Cry for the moon with the Japanese X-men

Shock! Please find enclosed the intro for the Japanese version of the mid-nineties X-men cartoon, the one that pretty much raised me. I'm sure that if I had grown up with the Japanese version I'd be a lot louder. Break out!

Marvel Babies. You heard me, Marvel freakin' Babies

Thanks to Cinematical for tipping me off to this one.
It's Marvel. It's babies. It's wickle versions of Hulk, Spider Girl (or woman), Captain America, Wolverine, Spiderman and Doctor Octopus (Seriously, what does a baby need mechanical tentacles for?).
Some questions:

• Does Baby Hulk turn into Baby Bruce Banner? Can we please get Ang Lee to guest direct and episode in which the Hulk is a metaphor for anger and abandonment issues and consequentially, is shit-boring?
• Wolverine's raison d'etre is killing people. He's the best at what he does and what he does ain't pretty enough for family entertainment. Since I'm guessing this is aimed at toddlers what exactly is going to be Logan's schtick if he can't cut HYDRA agents in half?
  
• How much freedom should Marvel Babies give up for security?
• They're not making a Runaways show because...?
• Doctor Octopus- why?
  
• And they do what exactly? They're too young to be fighting crime, even baby-level crime like cookie thefts, and yet they're freakin' Superheroes and have to do something vaguely superheoric or this is just Rugrats in spandex. Which is just creepy
  
• The original Muppet Babies had a mother figure who had somehow given birth to a litter of half-human hybrid creatures, in a reference to the classic Island of Dr. Moreau. Who in the Marvel universe could fill such important shoes? Aunt May? The Avenger's butler Jarvis? The Weapon X programme (Cap and Wolverine are both graduates)? My guess- in the episode 'Marvel Babies- Dissasembled' we find out these are the Scarlet Witch and Vision's kids and they blink out of existence in a cross-over special with the other Marvel cartoons. It's edgy and kids can totally relate.
  

And lastly:

• Doctor Octopus- What the fuck?
  

Liveblogging a bad copy of a worse movie: Crank

As promised I have 'acquired' the film Crank, a copy of which magically found its way onto my computer and- Wait, let me start over.
I downloaded the film Crank via bittorrent since I don't believe I should have to pay for anything, ever, and that goes double for films with Jason Stratham in them. This said I did intend to review Crank since the premise was so absurd that maybe, just maybe, there was a great film in there. So, for the next eighty minutes and forty seconds I'll be watching Crank and recording my thoughts- LIVE! Get ready for an EXTREME blogging experience! EXTREEEME!

3.10: Okay, so a generically foreign evil-doer has informed Jason Stratham's 'Chev Chelios' that he has an hour to live. You don't want to get Chev Chelios mad. So far the film has been 190 seconds of dialogue and camera tricks that are about as appealing as having grandpa fart into my mouth.
3.11: The song 'New Noise' by Refused starts playing. This is the greatest film ever made.
4.05 The song 'New Noise' by Refused ends, replaced by Jason Stratham talking. Not good.
11.24: Mr. Chelios discovers that shovelling coke up your nose from the floor doesn't cure being poisoned. Who'da thunk it? Instead he declares: 'I know what I have to do... Kick some black ass!'. Even without the b-word in there it's a horrible piece of dialogue, but instead the writers chose to go down the oft-travelled 'horrible piece of dialogue + makes the main character look like an evil racist' route. He attacks twenty armed men of African-American descent with a baseball bat and... it cuts to the exterior of a building in 'da ghetto' with Mr. Chevy 'Tolerance' Chaseos running away from the now unnarmed persons of color.
16.03: The song 'Achy-Breaky Heart' by Billy Ray Cyrus is played. While I know it's supposed to be ironic I can't shake the sneaking suspiscion that I may be witnessing the worst piece of art in any medium ever produced by humankind.
18.25: Whichever mouth-breather gave up any chance of ever losing his virginity to film lousy movies for the Internet starts shaking the camera around. That or it's the only not-so-clever camera trick in this movie that I haven't seen in at least a dozen superior films.
21.02: Mr. Diversity 2006 Chev Chelios steals a cab by throwing its Middle Eastern driver to a pack of WASPs and shouting 'Al-Qaeda! Al-Qaeda!'.
33.09: Whilst in a hospital to score some ephinephrin, the ever-logical Mr. Chavro, or whatever, decides to get himself zapped by those heart paddle thingies. Clear!
36.17: The ephinephrin gives Chev Chelios a raging hard-on and he runs around L.A in hospital robes. I really wish I was kidding about this, that it was some quirky gag at the expense of this awful, awful film, but that's basically the gist of the last five minutes of the film.
37.25: Chevy steals a police bike and rides around while Harry Nillson's 'Everybody's Talkin' At Me' is playing. The combination of stealing law enforcement vehicles and listening to classic rock gives everybody who's ever played a Grand Theft Auto game chronic deja-vu poisoning.
38.20: Okay, going from standing on the police-bike in a Jesus pose with Nillson playing to jumping face-first into a cafe table is kinda cool.
42.24: Chevy Cheerios burns his hand in a waffle iron after it becomes apparent that the ephinephrin hasn't cured his poisoning. Like you would. He must then keep his pretenaturally dim girlfriend from discovering that evil Mexican thugs are trying to kill him in yet another 'it would be awesome if this was a mission in Grand Theft Auto' moment.
49.30: Once again we see why Chevelle Cheesedoodle is such a compelling protagonist: He rapes his girlfriend (Amy Smart) in the middle of a crowded street while being gawped at by passersby.
49.55: Don't worry folks! It turns out the lady actually likes it so everything's okay! Everything about this film makes me feel dirty.
50.44: Crowds cheer as The Chevster bends his beau over a bench and... well you know the rest. Normally I'd say something like 'I wish I was making this up', but in this case if I made up a scene as horribly, horribly wrong as this one I'd be a shoe-in for 'Worst Human Being: 2006 (Western Hemisphere)'.
51.08: Oh, and he takes a phonecall mid way through. And his rape victim gets angry because he stopped.
51.30: Back on the road again, the filmmakers feel the need to subtitle a Carribean cab-driver's dailogue. You know, because those types do talk funny and that.
61.30: During a car-chase feminist icon Amy Smart decides to 'finish what (they) started' earlier on that busy street by blowing Chevy as he drives, basically ensuring that for the rest of her life she'll never be able to look another woman in eye without crying and saying how sorry she is.
62.17: Amy Smart notes that Chevron is 'so big'. You know, I have an inkling that this film might just have a tiny bit of adolescent male wish-fufilment in it.
78.55: And now Chevy Chemo is falling out of a helicopter while having a fistfight with his arch-nemesis Evil Foreign Guy.
79.27: Having snapped Evil Foriegn Guy's neck somehow, Chex Chavrus remembers to call his girlfriend while falling and deliver a heart-wrenching monologue about how he wishes he had time to 'smell the roses' (i.e: 'Sodomise you some more, maybe this time in a schoolyard')
80.46: He falls on a car and dies. Probably. We see him blink after he bounces off the car. It's kind of like that bit in X-men 3 where Magneto can still kinda control metal at the end. Only several times worse because it's in this movie.

In Conclusion: Yes, this is the worst film I've seen in perhaps five years. It's horribly written, badly acted, flashy without an ounce of subtance and has the politics of Ann Coulter reincarnated as a fourteen year-old white boy playing Counter-Strike way past his bed-time. As a concept it had the potential to get a billion teenage boys into cinema seats where they could be told what wretched, shallow little creatures they are for wanting to watch the kind of crap the trailers promised, a little like Metal Gear Solid 2 or Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers if I'm feeling charitable. I had high hopes that maybe the writers would pull the rug out from under me and show they were just the tiniest bit aware that they were making something aimed square at whatever's under the lowest common demoniator, just in case somebody with a three figure IQ had to sit through it.
And, in case you're thinking that you and your bros from Kappa-Beta-Phi are gonna drink like a whole keg and watch this movie, get this: As action movies go it's sub-par. For a film hung up on MTV-style jump-cuts and 24-style split-screens the film becomes positively unimaginative when it's showing a shoot-out or a car chase. Anybody who's seen anything by John Woo, or even something vaguely inspired by Hong-Kong Bullet Ballet is going to find the action sequences to be as clunky as the script. Anybody who's seen Gone in Sixty Seconds or the Fast and the Furious series has seen better automotive stunts. Shit, the Dukes of Hazzard probably has Crank beat on that front.
This is an awful, awful, awful, film. You shouldn't go see it and nobody involved in its production should ever work again.